If you work with computers in your business or line of work, you know that there's nothing more frustrating than accidentally deleting a file, or worse yet, losing your data entirely because of a hard drive crash, a power spike, or you do something careless like leaving your laptop in a coffee shop. But if you're like me, you take precautions, and you backup, backup, backup.

But even if we are systematic in our data storing habits, sometimes we forget to back up our work when we need to the most, and zap, hours of programming, writing, or number crunching does right down the drain. But fortunately, there is a lot of capable technology available for us to recover and save some of our hard work, data recovery software that can save our geeky asses when there's a critical crash. We can't predict when some technical glitch will cause some hardware failure, so lucky for us that file recovery programs are available to watch our nerdy backs when we neglect to secure our data.

Now, it's not always a hard drive failure that gets us into trouble. Our own carelessness (yes, we can tend to be overzealous in our file deletion methods, and turn off the Recycle Bin when it suits us) is just as much to blame for our data deletion woes. So when our drive takes a dive, or our raid goes astray, we can be comforted in the knowledge that there is data and partition recovery software out there that can save ourselves a whole lot of rewriting, recoding, and re-crunching. However, it's doubtful that any data recovery software will help us find our lost laptop, unless we've got GPS installed...